5 services of Drones for increased airports and waterways safety and security.

Project Information

5D-AeroSafe

Grant agreement ID: 861635

DOI

10.3030/861635

Project closed

EC signature date 28 April 2020

Start date 1 June 2020

End date 30 November 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 3 799 911,25

EU contribution

€ 3 497 475,00

Coordinated by

AIRBUS DEFENCE AND SPACE SAS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 5D-AeroSafe (5 services of Drones for increased airports and waterways safety and security.)

Reporting period: 2021-12-01 to 2023-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

5D-AeoroSafe project aims to be a first step in the study of the utilisation of drones for Airport/Waterport operation and maintenance. The concept of the project is to develop an advanced concept technological demonstrator to enable the operation in safe conditions of drones in a complex Air Traffic environment. The missions allocated to drones are the following ones:
1. Detection of defects or issues on the air or water platform: the drones are equiped with cameras that provides the pictures that will be analysed by the computer vision system to detect these defects.
2. Verify the status of the orientation system on the taxiways and runways.
3. Calibrate the landing aids by using a specifically developped sensor.
4. Monitor the platform and its surrounding to detect security breaches.
The drones are centrally managed around a Generic Ground Control Station (GGCS) that allocates the missions and gathers the mission reports.
The missions are defined by the local Air Traffic Control '(ATC) that manages the airport/Waterport.
In order to perform the missions in total conditions of safety, 5D-AeroSafe develops an IT platform around a middleware that manages all the project data and that has a double road:
1. manage the missions (from the taskind orders to the production of reports),
2. Deconflict the drone missions with the manned flights.
The interest to use drones for these operatios is obvious for the end-users and stakeholders. It enbles the inspection of the infrastructure that is much quicker than with the current solutions and the needed staffing is reduced. The challenge is to demonstrate that the system is not adding risks in terms of flight safety. In the current situation, the two types of flight will be separated. In the future, due to an improved UTM, the drone missions will be performed with more flexibility and a cohabitation will be possible.
The project will develop the system in an incremental way with 2 main versions (V1 and V2) which will be tested in 2 real airports 'one regional and one international) and 1 waterport in a greek island.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first part of the project was dedicated to the analysis of the users and stakeholders requirements, the concepts of operations of the system and the regulatory dframework supporting the drone operations (current one and envisaged evolutions). The whole material was validated by the consortium and external advisers. The security missions will be defined in the second part of the project.
In a second step, the system specifications and design were defined. The design was validated during the first f2f meeting of the project in Athens, July 2021.
The first pilot (supported by the ENAC simulation tool) was satisfactorilly performed in December 2021 (remote event due to covid conditions) with 2 months delays compared to the initial plan.
The second part of the project was dedicated to the finalisation of the development of the components (drones segment, 5D platform and interfaces with external ,systems), the integration of the system and the pilots. The first version of the integrated system nwas tested in Corfou for the waterways inspection in September 2022 and in Radom airport (Poland) in October 2022. The second integrated version of the system was tested and demonstrated in Lavrio (Greece) for the waterways inspection (June 2023), near Athens for the calibration of landing aids (September 2023) and in Radom airportnin October 2023. A final workshop assessed the results of the project under EUROCONTROL pilotage just after.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The system in its first version (V1) is currently under development. Progress beyond the state of the art will be demonstrated during the pilots execurion scheduled in Q3 2022.
For the final version of the system, the progress beyond the state of the art is the integration, of the drone segment in the ATM (UTM-ATM integration) and with other activities in the environment. Thye end-users (owner and managers of the airports and waterports can operate the drones in a fully automated way for the flights. The 5D-Aerosafe system is therefiore a prototype that can be led wto a commercial product in a short time.

Inspection of a VOR with a VTOL drone

Preparation of a drone mission in Rhodes Airport (Greece)